For me, 2022 is about thrillers. This year, one of my reading goals is to discover series popular or unpopular, characters with great development, anti heroes with interesting backstories. Shortly, books will keep me awake until 4 am. Now, some of my favorite thrillers authors are: M.J Arlidge, Jo Nesbo, and Stefan Ahnmen. But after I read One Girl Missing, I think is a change that my list can expand.

One girl missing – Carla Kovach

I pick One girl missing just because I liked the synopsis, everything sounded captivating. The first thing I noticed was that this book is the eleventh in the series Detective Gina Harte by Carla Kovach. I thought about that time when I messed up the order of books of the Helen Grace series and I said: what if I can read this book without knowing the background story? Would I understand the action? The answer? Yes. The only problem was about the relationship between the main character and her ex-boyfriend, but this isn’t the main plot of the book so it doesn’t matter.

The action starts with 2 women walking home in the evening. Suddenly, a car is coming toward them. One is hit and another is kidnapped. After this moment, everything becomes a race with the clock. The woman who was deadly injured is in critical condition and every hour matters. But then another one… how much time she has left? How much time before the criminal decides to kill her?

Who is the murderer?

I like that character who is guilty isn’t obvious from the first chapters. It took me nearly 200 pages to guess correctly and even at that moment I wasn’t 100% sure. The author played us, giving a lot of clues, pointing to a character just to switch when I believed that I understand the reasons for the murderer. The fact that she gave us a character that wasn’t present in the book, just mentioned, and I was ready to blame everything on him… well done, Carla.

Something that I don’t really like is that the action in One girl missing is a little complicated and not in the good sense. I think the author wanted to punish every character that did something wrong and for that, she wrote a lot of scenarios and involved events from the past, traumas, old cases, everything.

Another important thing about One girl missing is that the author wrote about women that were abused. This book raises awareness about rape, unwanted attention that keeps coming, and the shame that comes upon victims. The main idea is to encourage girls, women to speak for themselves, that they are not alone and that they can combine their voices to give strength to their case.